VEB Polytechnik Karl-Marx-Stadt is my dev to watch for 2026.
If the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—that is, East Germany—is known for anything, it’s an irrepressible sense of fun. And yet, somehow, the country only produced a single arcade cabinet across its entire 41-year existence: the Poly-Play—six feet of East German engineering in creamy wood-grain, manufactured by VEB (Volkseigener Betrieb, or publicly owned enterprise) Polytechnik Karl-Marx-Stadt, the city now called Chemnitz.
Produced in 1985 and numbering around 2,000 altogether, the Poly-Play was a chimeric assemblage of parts not made for arcade cabinets. Its monitor was a repurposed German TV set, its cab produced by furniture maker VEB Raumkunst Mosel. It was a bright window into a computerised, socialist future that loomed across GDR holiday homes and youth centres.
That it was unique in East Germany’s manufacturing output shouldn’t be taken as an indictment. The socialist half of Deutschland was, if anything, a lot less suspicious of gaming than the west, which banned kids from playing arcade games in 1984. In fact, planners and ideologues hoped the proliferation of computers and gaming software would spark the imaginations of a new generation of engineers, and the state encouraged citizens to get into home computing in official magazines like Der Funkamateur.
East Germany was just late to the arcade. By the time it was producing the Poly-Play, its comrades in the USSR had been producing arcade machines of one form or another for around a decade. Though to be fair to the Germans, it wasn’t the country’s first gaming machine. That honour goes to the BSS 01: a proletarian Intellivision that no one really bought and no one really liked. People did like the Poly-Play, though, and I was determined to find out why.Arbeiter, Bauern, nehmt eure Gamepads
I’m telling you all this because A) I am very unwell, and B) I recently learnt you can still play the Poly-Play today. Either by flying to Germany and finding a still-functional cabinet or, slightly easier, using the emulator that some preservation hero has uploaded to the Internet Archive. You can also slap a core for it onto your MiSTer, if you’re a real pervert (I mean that as a compliment).
It might be the GDR’s solitary arcade cabinet, but you got a lot of bang for your 50 pfennigs. The machine’s U880 microprocessor—a hardy, dialectical knock-off of the Zilog Z80, produced by a different VEB with Karl Marx in the name (you have to wonder if they ever got confused)—would run any of eight games for you. These were:
Hirschjagd (Deer Hunt)
Hase und Wolf (Hare and Wolf)
Absfahrtslauf (Downhill)
Schmetterlinge (Butterflies)
Schießbude (Shooting Gallery)
Autorennen (Motor Race)
Merkspiel (Memory Game)
Wasserrohrbruch (Water Pipe Burst)
It is with deep regret that I inform you the majority of these games do not hold up in the era of Baldur’s Gate 3. Hirschjagd is a game about annihilating deer on a timer, your crusty shotgun barely capable of spitting its pellets further than you can throw a punch.
